Arrow

Arrow is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for columnar data. This means that support for Arrow is growing rapidly (both languages and tools). Due to the amazing effort behind the format, using Arrow is now likely the fastest way to:

• Read and write Parquet formatted files
• Read CSV into columnar data
• Exchanging columnar data

Polars uses an Arrow memory buffer as the most basic building block for the Polars Series. This means that we exchange data between Polars and Arrow without copying it. It also means that Polars shares the same performance gains that Arrow receives.

Convert a Polars DataFrame or Series to Arrow using the .to_arrow() method. Similarly, importing from Arrow data structure can be performed with the .from_arrow() functions.